I found this forum searching on the internet something about "mixing ambient tracks" becaused I've been so wretched recently noticing how far are from sounding good my pieces.Anyway I am Carlo Alberto (you can call me Caio) and I come from Torino (Italy), I am 21 and I hope we may have nice time together.I make music, I listen to a lot of genres and I can say some of my favourite names, such as Coil, Black sun Productions, Prurient, Simon Balestrazzi, be maledetto now!, Haus Arafna and many others.

My name is Jim Young. I'm 58 years old and live in the town of Ashland, Oregon. By day I'm a DBA and data warehouse specialist. By night and weekends, time permitting, I dabble in creating ambient/abstract music. I publish (if you can call it that) my works via my web site Ambient Alchemy, and through the Ambient Alchemy podcast, which is accessible through iTunes, FeedBurner or directly through the RSS feed.

I've been a listener and appreciator of ambient music for many years. I think my first introduction to the genre was Tangerine Dream, later the works of Jonn Serrie , Michael Stearns, Ray Lynch. These days I listen to a steady diet of Steve Roach, Robert Rich, Erik Wollo and also enjoy the more dark edgy stuff like Sky Burial. I'm a huge fan of the Space Music podcast, TC puts on a great show. I was a regular listener to HOS and Echos, until, sadly, our local NPR station dropped those programs in favor of pretty much endless jazz.

I stumbled across this forum while looking for an online community that was centered around ambient music and its composition. It looks like I've found the right place!

I am a returning member to this forum. Haven't really had much time to work on music the last few years due to being laid off in 2009 and attempting to find work in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. Didn't work out, so now I'm back home in Pennsylvania.

Just wanted to say hello now that I'm back on the forum. Feel like I'm starting all over again with my music as well as my life. Still have the MacBook Pro running Ableton Live 8. My current favorite synth is Zebra 2 by u-he. This synth is a powerhouse and now that I have loads of time on my hands til I find a new job, I figure I might as well start composing again.

Any tips or advice for a newbie approaching ambient production is welcome. Unlike the trance I used to write, I have no idea how a basic DAW workflow template should look for ambient. Will be searching the forum threads for any good topics or tutorials I may have missed since leaving.

Hi Jim - I agree with Seren. Don't start from a "workflow" - just start making sounds, and tweaking and adjusting, until you come up with something you like. I'm usually not able to articulate my workflow until after I'm finished.

But what about approaching your compositions. Do you start with loops or do you do long recording passes on each track?

I'm not sure how much of a pad should be automated by modulation within the synth itself, and how much is manually controlled during overdubs (like playing some chord progressions first, then go back and automate parameters with MIDI controls). All the songs I really like tend to be a nice balance of pure ambience and rhythmic tracks...regardless if there's an actual beat.

Since I'm still learning how to program Ableton better, I was just wondering if there were any native tools that worked well with ambient compositions. I found a very good article on generative music with Ableton. I'll try a test of that tutorial and see if it provides good results.

I do like the idea of throwing away all my trance-related preconceptions, it feels more adventurous that way...but I feel like a total newbie approaching ambient composition.

My name is Hédi and I'm a new member of this forum which I read since more than one year now. I'm in the electronic music field since more than 20 years now and plunged into ambient music genre at the same time while discovering Steve Roach early works at that time (and I'm still a big fan). I'm really happy to have joined this like-mind small community.

I'm very sensible to landscape, soundscape and nature. These main elements have deeply influenced my life, both personally and professionally. I've lived in France and moved to Iceland some years ago. I'm a photographer, architect, graphic/web designer and former university teacher.

My musical interests and tools are textures, rhythms and environmental soundscapes. My setup gravitates around a laptop with Ableton Live, MaxForLive (custom made step sequencers), Max and few plug-ins (mainly reverbs and filters), an Eventide Eclipse, an eurorack modular synth, some sdiy synths (Shruthi), and a pocket field recorder device (Sony PCM-D50).

My music is between atmospheric and dark drones, environmental field recordings, abstract and/or melodic sequences. Here are some extracts of recent works:

Hello everyone, it seems that certain associations and my desire to hear and create Ambient music has finally got me to this place and happy to be here. My name is Martyn (51 years old) and I am from Staffordshire in the UK, I am a member of various other Electronic Music forums and am interested in EM music, both recorded and live via local concerts I also listen regularly to Electro-Music and stillstream radio shows. Looking through some of the members names I read a few that I know both in person and via other forums. I hope to be an active member here and contribute accordingly to members posts that I find interesting and will also post up some of my music from time to time :-)